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My Schedule for Readercon 25 (2014)

Monday,July7th,2014

I’ll be at Readercon this weekend, July 10-13. All of my programming is on Friday, but I’ll also be around all day Saturday.

Friday July 11, 11:00 AM“Everything in Moderation: How to Moderate”Leah Bobet, Jim Freund, Elaine Isaak, Victoria Janssen (leader), James Patrick Kelly.
An exceptional moderator is usually someone who has moderated panels in the past, understands the subject matter, knows a bit about the panelists, and realizes that they are there to guide the conversation—not to impress the audience with their brilliant insight. Good moderators know that you are here for the panelists, and they work hard to coax the quiet panelists into the discussion and nicely shut down the the hijackers. Moderation is a skill and an art. We invite you to learn from our best.

Friday July 11, 2:00 PM“When the Magic Returns”John Chu, Max Gladstone, Daryl Gregory, Lev Grossman, Victoria Janssen (leader).
The “return” of magic into a mundane world is one of very few ways in which we see fantasy set in the future. Why is this? What makes fantasy and futurity so incompatible? Why is the return of magic so often associated with apocalypse, while its banishment is usually the consequence of scientific or industrial progress? From Aarne-Thompson tale types like the Fairies’ Farewell to Kim Harrison’s Hollows series, panelists will talk about the ways in which magic-as-technology can be explored.

Friday July 12, 3:00 PM“Speculative Fiction and World War I.”John Clute, Felix Gilman, Victoria Janssen (leader), Jess Nevins, Graham Sleight, Sonya Taaffe.
On 28 July 1914, Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia, and World War I began. Hugo Gernsback had not yet named science fiction at the time, but proto-SF stories inspired by the war exist, many early SF writers would draw inspiration from their experiences of the wartime era, and alternate history stories of WWI are numerous. WWI had a tremendous effect on fantasy and horror stories as well, with surrealist, expressionist, and apocalyptic modes flourishing alongside tales of lost arcadias. Looking back 100 years later, how did WWI shape the readers and writers of speculative fiction and the genre as a whole?